We had a great 3-day Michael Ellis seminar at Leerburg last weekend. Because of COVID-19 we had to cap the attendance at 70 people. Michael's style of teaching seminars lends itself to working with a larger number of students. Hands down he is one of the best lecturers we have ever worked with. We preselected (from videos that were sent in) dogs to demonstrate the topics being talked about and our students learned a lot.

We filmed the seminar and will use the video in several new online hybrid courses. The first being “Leash Reactivity with Michael Ellis” which we hope to release before the end of the year. The new Hybrid Courses are slightly different than what we have done in the past. The self-study course will still be available but there will be an option for the hybrid-interactive course in which once a month at a designated time Michael will hold a live chat with students to answer questions. Details on when courses will be released will be posted on our website and in our newsletters.

On Friday, Michael lectured on “Developing Your Relationship with Your Dog" and focused a lot on engagement and using markers to communicate. We spent a full day on Saturday covering “Leash Reactivity” using a lot of the topics and skills from Friday. On Sunday we finished with the final stages of training and Michael had a great discussion-provoking segment on “How to Introduce Remote Collar Stimulation to Your Dog”. He also lectured extensively on “Positive and Negative Reinforcement" along with “Positive and Negative Punishment”.

We always learn a lot when Michael comes to visit us and we hope that the students who were able to attend did too. It was great getting to meet some new people in the dog training community and even see some familiar faces as well. Thank you to everybody for coming out and making this event so wonderful!

- The Leerburg Team